Was world's failure to act racism? asks Kagame

Paul Kagame: leader of the Rwandese
Patriotic Front

By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic
Editor

12:01AM BST 06 Apr 2004

As Rwandans begin the formal remembrance of the victims of the genocide that began 10 years ago today, President Paul Kagame has denounced the world's "deliberate failure" to stop the slaughter of ethnic Tutsis.

"When genocide takes place, the international community should not shy away from its responsibilities ... How could the lives of one million Rwandese be considered so insignificant?" he asked, speaking for many of his countrymen who lived through the 100 days of terror.

"Do the powerful nations have a hidden agenda? I would hate to believe that this agenda is dictated by racist considerations or the colour of the skin. I hope it is not true," he said.

Mr Kagame was addressing an international conference marking the start of a week of official commemorations for the genocide in which Hutu extremists killed between 500,000 and one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The killings started on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying the then president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down by a missile as it came in to land at Kigali airport.

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The identity of the assassins has never been conclusively proved. It was long blamed on Hutu extremists who objected to a peace accord signed by Mr Habyarimana, also a Hutu, with Tutsi rebels.

But last month a report by a French judge, leaked to Le Monde, accused Mr Kagame of allegedly giving the go-ahead for the attack. In any case, Hutu extremists immediately put into action a pre-planned and systematic campaign to wipe out the Tutsis and any Hutu who got in their way.

Incited by government officials and inflammatory radio broadcasts, Hutu soldiers, militiamen and ordinary villagers hunted down their ancestral Tutsi foes.

Churches, where many terrified Tutsis had gathered for protection, turned into places of horrifying slaughter. The few United Nations peacekeepers in the country could only watch helplessly.

French troops eventually were deployed in the south of the country in "Operation Turquoise", but their action has been widely condemned as an attempt to protect their traditional Hutu clients rather than save the victims of the genocide.

The killings only stopped in August when the Tutsi-dominated rebel group, the Rwandese Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame, marched on Kigali and took power. But the war spilled over into neighbouring Zaire, to where Hutu extremists had retreated along with hundreds of thousands of refugees, sparking a civil war that drew in at least six neighbouring countries.

The conflict in the renamed Democratic Republic of Congo - still unresolved despite progress in power-sharing talks - has, according to aid groups, killed more than three million people through murder, disease and starvation.

Mr Kagame has in recent weeks blamed France not only for failing to stop the genocide but for allegedly helping its Hutu allies carry out the murders. Yesterday he did not repeat the claims that the French government supplied weapons, logistical support and even senior military planners to the Hutus as they carried out the genocide.

The president said the UN commander in Rwanda, Maj Gen Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian, was "a very good man caught up in a mess".

But he admitted that at the height of the killings he considered attacking UN peacekeepers to steal their weapons. "Dallaire had soldiers, weapons and armoured personnel carriers and I confess for the first time that I contemplated taking those arms from him by force," Mr Kagame said, drawing gasps and some applause from his audience of government officials, diplomats and academics.

"I rolled it in my mind and talked it over with my colleagues in the bush, but we knew that it would open another front for us to fight, so after second thoughts I abandoned the idea."